Dark Eden (30 page)

Well, they do get worse if you don’t think straight, I told myself. Look what you’ve bloody done. As if there wasn’t enough trouble to deal with already, you’ve come over here to the one person that’s made an enemy of everyone, and caused all the trouble in the first place. And he’ll cause more and more, you know he will, because he can’t leave a thing alone, he can’t bear anything that hasn’t got his personal mark on it.

And then I thought of cruel cruel David back in Family, and cold Caroline, who refused even to consider whether John had a point, and bloody old stupid bossy Liz Spiketree and the creepy Secret Ree, and I thought, I hate this whole world. I hate Eden, this miserable dark place we’re all trapped in for bloody ever. We shouldn’t
be
here, that’s the real problem: it wasn’t the world we were made for. We were meant to live in light.’

Pretty soon John started to snore and I couldn’t stand it in that lousy cave for a minute more.

There was more air outside, but of course not the bright light of Earth. It was dark like Eden always is, darker even than in the cave: dark except for the lanterns and the stars. In fact, I thought, it was
still
a cave really out there, still a cave, only with stars instead of rocklanterns. That was what Eden was like. We were trapped inside a dark little cave with no way out of it. And even though I’d never known anything else, and probably never
would
do, I longed and longed for that different world that was full of light. I don’t mean just longed for it in a sad wistful way. I longed for it like a blind person must long to see. I longed for it like you’d long for air if you couldn’t breathe. I had to stop myself from screaming out.

‘What’s keeping you, Earth?’ I muttered. ‘When are you going to bloody come for us?’

‘Hello Tina, are you alright?’

Weird Jeff was out there, sitting on a rock. He’d been looking out over forest of Cold Path Valley with the dark shadows of mountains all around it. A couple of starbirds were calling out to each other across it.
Hoom! Hoom! Hoom!
came from some way off and then, quite near,
Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah!
Two three monkeys were chasing through the trees below us, making their funny clicking noises, and flashing their bright blotchy skins.

‘Why are
you
up?’ I asked him, and it came out almost like I thought he’d done something wrong.

He looked at me with his big round eyes.

‘My feet hurt,’ he said. ‘They hurt too much for me to sleep.’

He wasn’t crying or anything – that wasn’t what Jeff was like – but he lifted up one of his twisted old feet to show me. It was all bloody and raw.

‘Michael’s names! That must hurt.’

I looked around to find some water. Streams in the hills could be really cold because they came fresh down from Snowy Dark, but I found a small pool just a bit below the caves that was warmed by hot spiketree roots. Water came into one side of it cold cold from Dark, and trickled out the other side warm warm, as it made its way down to Cold Path Stream. I led Jeff down there and helped him bathe and get all the dirt off. Then I mashed up some starflowers, which they say help a bit with raw wounds like that, and smeared the mixture onto his twisted old clawfeet.

I’m not someone who likes to look after people all that much. I never played mummies when I was a kid. I never wanted to help look after the littles back in group like some young girls do. I never looked forward to the time when I’d have kids of my own. But it felt good to have something to do. And after I had dried his feet off as best I could, I put my arm round him and we lay down by the pool there and pretty soon, what with the trickling trickling water and everything, we both went off to sleep.

‘What are you doing?’

I was really scared for a moment. Someone was standing over us with a spear.

Then I saw it was John.

‘Oh, it’s you.’

Jeff was still asleep but I released my arm from around him, rubbed it a bit because it had gone numb, and sat up. I don’t know how long we’d been there, but the dip had passed and sky was grey-black again like it normally was, with Starry Swirl hidden away again until the next dip. I didn’t want to wake up. I’d been having that lovely dream that everyone has, the dream about Earth, where there isn’t darkness behind everything but only light, light, light.

‘I don’t want women slipping with young boys in my new family.’

What?
Gela’s
eyes
, there were so
many
different things wrong with that single statement that it was hard to know where to start!

‘I’m
not
slipping with him, you idiot. He’s a little kid, for Gela’s sake! His feet were hurting, I came down here with him to help him wash them, and we fell asleep … And another thing,
I’m
a kid too. I’m a newhair, like you are, not a woman. And
another
thing, what do you mean
your new family
? A new family? Yours?’

He opened his mouth to answer but I hadn’t finished.

‘Yes, and what business is it of yours who I slip with anyway? You didn’t ask me when you went with Martha London or with …’

I was going to say Bella, but I stopped in time.

‘We should have new rules,’ he said. ‘New family rules about who slips with who. It was different on Earth. It hasn’t always been like how it is now in Family.’

‘We can talk about it,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘And as to building up a new family,’ he said, ‘well, we’ve got to, haven’t we? We can’t go back to the old one.’

He relaxed a bit and squatted down.

‘You shouldn’t sleep out here like this. There were three leopards near here only a couple of wakings past.’

‘Yeah. We heard them back in Family. David said they’d probably done for you.’

‘He should be so lucky.’

He examined the tip of his blackglass spear the way grownup hunters do, checking to see that the edge was still good.

‘We need to build up a new family and we need to find out how to get across Snowy Dark and find a new place for ourselves,’ he said.

I thought about this.

‘Well, we can probably find a few more kids who’ll come and join us. We could go back through forest, meet up with newhairs when they’re out alone, see if we can talk them into coming over.’

He nodded.

‘Yes, that’s what we’ll do. There’ll be enough of them wanting to, I’m sure. Trouble is, the more that come over, the sooner we’re going to make Council so angry that they’ll want to stamp us out.’

‘How could they, though? In the end, how could they?’

‘They could kill us.’

‘Kill? I know people would
like
to kill us, but no one’s ever done for another person, have they, never even once on Eden.’

‘Things are different now,’ said John, the one who’d
made
things different whether we wanted him to or not. ‘Everything’s different and always will be from now on.’

Back up at the caves Gerry had woken up.

‘Jeff?’ he called out. ‘Tina? John?’

‘Down here!’ John called back.

He turned back to me.

‘I’ve started to think about how to cross Dark,’ he told me. ‘We need to begin building up a big supply of skins, and buckfeet. We won’t keep them all here, though. We’ll hide them in different places. People are going to come over here from Family sooner or later looking for us, and we don’t want them taking all our stuff. We’ll need a lot of skins and we’ll need to find ways of covering ourselves like they did on Earth, so as to keep warm. It can’t be that hard. The hardest bit is covering up our feet in a way that will keep out the snow. I’ve been thinking about how to make footwraps, with buckgrease to keep out the water and something hard on the bottom to stop them wearing through.’

He broke off, looking down at Jeff.

‘
He
won’t be able to manage it, though, will he? I wish you hadn’t brought him. It won’t work with clawfeet.’

Jeff opened his big innocent eyes.

‘What about a horse?’ he said.

He must have been awake for a little while.

John snorted.

‘Horse? What are you talking about?’

‘Back on Earth they had animals called horses, remember? They were animals that could carry them anywhere they wanted to go.’

‘Yes, Jeff,’ I said, like a grownup talking to an annoying little child, ‘we know that, dear, but this isn’t Earth, is it? There aren’t horses in Eden.’

Jeff sat up.

‘I don’t think horses were a special kind of animal,’ he said. ‘I think they took baby animals and then raised them up so as to make them
into
horses. We could use woollybucks.’

‘Yes, Jeff,’ John said, ‘but the Earth animals weren’t like Eden ones, were they? They had eyes like our eyes, eyes that you could look into and see what they were feeling. They
had
feelings. They had one heart like us, and red blood, and four limbs. They were almost
like
people. You could understand them. You could teach them things.’

We none of us said anything for a bit after that. It was funny. I’d just assumed at first that it was Jeff being crazy as normal, but when I thought about it, it struck me that maybe this idea of his wasn’t as mad mad as it first seemed.

‘I suppose we could
try
and catch a baby woollybuck,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Why not? It’s worth a go.’

‘We could ride on their backs and then we’d have their headlanterns to light our way,’ Jeff said.

‘And they
know
the way, don’t they?’ I said. ‘Remember those ones we saw when we were here before, John? With Old Roger? High up on Dark? They were going somewhere, weren’t they? They weren’t just hanging around. And their lanterns were lighting up the snow.’

I looked at John.

‘Come to think of it, John, how else exactly did you think we
were
going to see our way? You couldn’t keep torches burning long up there, could you? And if you break a branch of lanterns from a tree, they only last half an hour tops before the light fades.’

John didn’t say anything to this.

‘What was your plan, then?’ I demanded. ‘Were you thinking we’d just
feel
our way across Dark?’

‘I haven’t bloody worked it all out yet, alright?’ he said.

I smiled because, for a moment there, after all his grownup plans, he was just a kid again, all bristly and red because someone had criticized him.

Gerry came up to us. He had his spike-headed spear in his hand.

‘What’s going on? What are you talking about?’

‘Jeff was saying we could catch a baby woollybuck, a little buckling, and make it into a horse to lead us through Dark,’ I said.

Gerry nodded. He knelt by the stream and scooped up some water to drink with cupped hands, then squatted down beside us.

‘A horse. You’ve often thought about that, haven’t you, Jeff? An animal that would be a helper.’

He looked proudly at me.

‘He’s got all kinds of ideas, my brother. He’s
smart
smart.’

I laughed and felt a bit fonder of these two weird boys than I had done before.